Josh: The RawPower app can export images from the Photo Library but can’t directly support the directory structure you want. Users have reported exporting 500 images at a time without problem. Nik says trying to do thousands of images at once would probably run out of memory.
David
I’m a bit late to this, but @jcenters the method @gastropod suggests is probably the most straightforward as you’re simply manipulating the files instead of getting some other application to do mysterious things. Two notes if you want to go down this route:
.photoslibrary bundle and then do Find (in the File menu) and select the ‘originals’ button in the Search: bar at the top of the window. Hold down option and click the … on the right of the search criteria. This will give you a search group which you can set to None of the following are true. Have one criteria underneath: Kind is Folder. This finds all files in all subfolders in the ‘originals’ folder. You can select them all and drag them to a new folder.The reason I recommend using Adobe Lightroom Classic is that it reads the metadata of the files and builds the folder structure in the Finder based on that. A good date based folder structure is the best long-term way to store photos.
Photos sometimes does fail to export when exporting large amounts of Photos. However this is mostly the case when you either use a Storage optimized iCloud Library or when you have set Photos to “Download originals to this Mac” but Photos has failed to do so. Photos can sometimes be a real pain when it comes to actually downloading all photos from iCloud.
So if you are about to export large amounts of photos or intend to use the originals folder in the Photos Library package then it is a good idea to verify that the amount of photos in the Photos application is about the same as in the folder structure in the originals folder.
To determine how many images/movies there are in the original´s folder you can use a simple terminal command:
find Pictures/Photos\ Library.photoslibrary/originals -type "f"|wc -l
If they are about the same then you can most likely export them. Sometimes you might need to export them in batches though if you have a really large library.
You could use the files in the originals folder instead of using the export feature in Photos but then you will have to live with having the photos named after Photos internal uuid:s. Of course, you could access the Photos database which is just a sqlite database and use the uuid:s from the filenames and extract the real filenames but exporting them is probably less work.
Then, when it comes to sorting the exported photos into date folders I assume that you want to sort on the Exif Creation date and if that is missing on the date of the file.
Personally I would use the free tool Exiftool for that:
exiftool -o . '-Directory<FileModifyDate' '-Directory<DateTimeOriginal' -d /path/to/destination/%Y/%m_%B/%Y.%m.%d -r /path/to/source/dir/
I exported a few photos from Lightroom and was pleased with the results, so I set it to export the entire library, which took all weekend. The result was a MESS. Duplicate and sometimes triplicate photos, broken Live Photos, photos out of order or assigned to the wrong year entirely. Just a mess.
So I’m going to delete that folder and the folders of all my failed experiments and export one year at a time, which is going to take forever because Photos export is passively-aggressively slow, but it’s the only reliable method I have found.
I am increasingly of the opinion that iCloud and Photos are both works of the devil.
I believe that moving all your iCloud photos into Google and then exporting them strips all the images of their valuable meta data.
Do they also now properly uninstall all of the detritus that adobe apps sprinkle through your OS?
I love LR Classic, but fell out of love when the subscription model was tinkered with. Then the other stuff floating around started to get really annoying.
Not helpful to you, sorry, but do keep an eye on those extensions Adobe installs.
r
Can Exiftool or something similar correct the file creation dates based on EXIF Creation Date? I would need to do this for large batches of photo files.
Backstory (do not read this if creation date problems with Adobe Lightroom do not interest you)…
This ties back to why I stopped allowing Lightroom in our house. Back around version 3 and 4, a large photo library was slowly being imported/indexed with Lightroom. Originals were only indexed. Any editing would be reserved for copies.
At some point I noticed large groups of the original photo files had changed Finder creation dates. Eventually it became clear that Lightroom was altering the creation date of original files just by being indexed (not edited). The creation dates were based on when a particular batch was imported/indexed.
As I believe the cardinal rule of software handling original data files is “thou shalt not change the creation date”, this put Lightroom on my eternal ban list.
I explored settings, tried wiping LR along with all its bits and settings, re-installed clean, toggled settings and ran a lot of tests. Eventually, LR would do it again (intermittently) and I do not recall if I discovered a pattern. The relevant settings were as they should be.
Adobe Lightroom support forums back then had a number of us asking this question to which the replies were either about a specific setting (which was set correctly) or some form of, “Lightroom would never do that. You are lying.” Thus, I banned LR.
Can Exiftool or something similar correct the file creation dates based
on EXIF Creation Date?
exiftool can do that. It’s possible that GUIs to exiftool such as graphics converter can also do that, though most GUIs are small subsets of what exiftool can do. A $25? option with a reasonable interface is A Better Finder Attributes; I don’t know if it’s using exiftool under the hood. It lets you set up drag&drop macros (droplets) for frequently wanted alterations. You can automate exiftool in applescript by executing a shell command, but it was somewhat flaky for me a few years ago when I played with it.
Thank you. This was something I never had time to revisit but I wanted a good targeted solution before diving back in.
I don’t know if you can easily do that with Exiftool although you probably can since it is a very sophisticated software. If you want a simple mac app that does it then you can use the free app Photodate To Filedate which I developed on request by one of my customers. I am a bit uncertain if it is OK to link to it since it is my own software and my company behind it but it is a free tool so I’ll just take my chances: https://free.brattoo.com
Thank you anders. I will give that a try on a test batch.
Since the aughts, I’ve used a donationware app ExifRenamer to do that. In a preference file, you set up how you want the date to be formatted in the file names and whether to add prefixes or suffixes. There are also numerous options for post-processing the files and folders involved. Then you create an alias to the app on your desktop and simply drag the folder of picture files whose names are to be changed over the alias. When I used to import my pictures to my Mac, the next step after the import was using ExifRenamer to rename the files.
The program was updated 2 years ago for Catalina, and, it still runs.
In Lightroom, as far back as I can remember (v4 or5) my Exif date shows original and date imported
(Final date listed)
We couldn’t figure out why LR was doing it at the time. All I know is eventually, a random group of photos that were being touched by LR would turn up with altered Finder creation dates. A cardinal sin for me with almost any software. 
In a pinch one can just use folder organization with text “log sheets” (searchable via Spotlight or even BBEdit). Low-tech but it works. Unfortunately, you don’t have the linking to the relevant photos and it requires a bit more manual leg work. You do save a lot of space on thumbnails, etc. Sort of a callback to the days of Nat.Geographic field photographers logging their stuff before sending it in.
In the get info window for a photo, click on “show more” next to “Information” and you will see “content created” date.
@jcenters the osxphotos python library is quite good at getting metadata out of the photos library db, including the filename of the original. If you can write python scripts it may help you. I have a public repo GitHub - montyz/photos-cleanup: cleanup of os x photos library which I used to read photos libraries and tag them and export to directories by year. It’s a mess but might give you an idea of how to iterate through the photos and export photos and albums.
I know that you have tried to do this with minimal cost, but have you considered Avalanche by CYME? I have used it for Aperture transfer, but it can do Photos as well.
Photos Takeout works for me. For Live Photos it does provide the option to export as JPG + MOV files. Maybe this feature was added after your post. My only grouse is that their long-promised incremental exports feature is still not available.
The easiest solution - PhotoFiler on the Mac App Store.